Earlier quoted context omitted.
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They ended up hiring 25-30yo white males. It wasn't about color. They just didn't want to pay full wages and didn't want to be told a hard "no" because of obvious safety problems.
Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
81–90 of 371 posts
Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#82Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#83Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you seen the economic costs of the cleanup operation though? It's absolutely astronomical (for various reasons). That money is not money going to new nuclear plants or renewables, but going to nowhere. This effects people too. Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion? (Depending on how you look at it) Is this controversial or something? Is that not a lo…
> Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion? 1) That isn't an astronomical number. It is $2,000-$8,000 per Japanese person. For a freak accident. Put that in $/kWh terms and you might find that nuclear was reasonably cost effective even in one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, let alone under normal conditions. 2) I don't know if it is controversial;…
Pretty sure the cleanup costs for continued use of coal, oil, and natural gas due to global climate change far exceed any from nuclear, including even Chernobyl.
Entire nations are disappearing under the rising seas [0]. So far they are relatively poor and lack political influence. Bangladesh is soon for the chopping block. Louisiana and Florida are not far behind. Folks really don't get how close to sea level massive portions of these very large areas are. Far larger than the Fukushima exclusion zone, that's for sure.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/tuvalu-turns-metaverse-...
Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#85Nuclear is the only optimistic energy solution—I.e. one that could enable continually increasing human prosperity, rather than rationing. Forget simply replacing today’s energy generation. That’s sad. What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available? Moreover, technology that will “level up” civilization is almost certainly going to be an outgrowth of nuclear development, or something similarl…
>What does the future look like when we have 10 times as energy available? What does the future look like when we have 10 times the efficency on energy use? This is the right question/goal. Denemark (IIRC) has sometimes reached the 100% solar/wind coverage, sure in a sunny day and low demand situation, but 10 years ago this was unthinkable. This appear the true way of prosperity, not the growt of availability/consump…
> What does the future look like when we have 10 times the efficency on energy use
Energy efficiency improvements of that magnitude don’t exist. In most industries, getting a 10% efficiency improvement would be groundbreaking. These are limits dictated by physics.
Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#86The article has a great flow chart in it that highlights rejected energy and energy services and where the rejected energy comes from. energy here spans the spectrum of electricity generation, heating, industrial usage, transport, etc. Basically more than two thirds of the energy is lost to heat, friction, noise, transmission losses, etc. Most of the losses are coal, gas, and oil. Important to note that the image is…
This chart distresses me: solar at 0.9 is only about a third of petroleum at 36. It is making it look like new renewable (ie non-hyrdo) are a lot more sizeable than they really are. From Lawrence Livermore this is hard to swallow. If the boxes sizes are on a weird logarithmic scale, then this should be explicit in the legend.
You are eagerly reading an agenda into what is probably just an artifact of the plotting software intended to make the plot easier to read. Hanlon’s razor applies here.
Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#87Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#88Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think that worst case is, and how are you estimating it?
Worst case is a continent wide Red Forest.
Chernobyl was a perfect storm of bad design, political corruption, and reckless behavior. No Western nuclear plant has ever run without a containment dome, has excluded basic plant design info from its operators, or put in incentives to run a reckless spin down experiment while also cutting all cooling and raising all control rods.
Three Mile Island was close to worst possible in a Western design, and those aspects that led to that accident were fixed 45 years ago.
Worst case isn't a nuclear accident at this point; it's continued reliance on fossil fuels and the accelerating effects from warming the planet. Huge swaths of land near the equator that will be rendered uninhabitable for large scale human habitation due to extreme heat events.
We have already seen 129 degrees in those areas with a real heat index (due to humidity) of 142. These areas are already at their absolute limit. That's your continent-wide Red Forest.
Re: Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe nuclear will make a comeback once the now installed wind/solar plants reach end of life and need replacement, but before that it is just too slow and uncertain to be effective tool (with our current engineering/construction capability!) to combat climate change imho. If we do not start working on brining nuclear power online now it will not be ready when the current generation of renewables needs replacement.…
> Does it matter if nuclear takes 15-20 years to build? No, it does not matter. When it's built it will help out. It matters because every dollar put into nuclear is dollar away from something else. Sure it would be great to have more resources put into nuclear power, and even more so into fusion power. But right now we are at a situation where that can not happen at the cost of things that have more immediate impact…
How about every dollar put into the social and economic fallout of large swaths of Florida and Louisiana falling underwater? That sounds like a pretty significant opportunity cost to me.